


Maybe Sprout Wings

by Adazzle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, But telling your kid you wish they weren’t yours is never ok, Draco is a good dad, Harry is a Good Dad, It’s just that all the characters are traumatized, M/M, No Dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:49:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28803102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adazzle/pseuds/Adazzle
Summary: Drabbles on Albus, and what getting better means
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	1. Shook me in my sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Titles from the mountain goats song "Maybe Sprout Wings" cause they've been my anthem this week
> 
> I don't own content
> 
> I've read various interpretations of Albus as merely a middle child to someone who suffers a lot of trauma. Cursed Child is loose canon for me so I'll say that I have SO many problems with the blanket scene, but I mostly wanted to explore how he might cope with anxiety, depression, or working through difficult family dynamics in this fic. Much of this is based off my personal experience.
> 
> TW: bullying, family therapy, mental illness

Loud noises make Albus uncomfortable. When he is little, and Sundays at the Burrow are too wild and noisy, he will hug his mum tightly and she will sit outside with him and talk to him about taking deep breaths. When he feels better, they’ll degnome the garden and then go inside.

At Hogwarts, he feels more bullied than Scorpius sometimes. He feels very bad, because no one calls him son of Voldemort. Scorpius has it worse. But people still laugh at him in Slytherin, where if Scorpius stays very quiet, which is hard for him, no one will be reminded of his grandparents turning in their grandparents to the Ministry to avoid prison. People will still think he is nothing.


	2. Ran Through The Dark

When Albus has nightmares as a five year old, he will wake up his dad, who will tell him to be brave and then sit with him until he falls asleep. Harry will wake up with him even after he’s worked late or had a bad press conference or can’t sleep himself.

The first time he feels really, really alone is at school when he can’t make his broomstick fly. He wants to ask James for help later, but he thinks he hears laughter and his name as James walks by, and he decides his brother thinks he’s as stupid as everyone else.


	3. Already forgetting

When James had laughed at him as he almost fell out of their box at the Quidditch World Cup when he was eight, Albus had been afraid, but Uncle Ron had caught him, and James had been really, genuinely sorry.

After he shouts at his dad and rips up his Hogsmeade permission slip, he can’t concentrate on his homework for a few days. He feels so guilty. But he’s angry at his dad too, and somehow that makes him not write back, because he wants to just be upset, and it’s hard to write right now, it’s hard for him to pick up his quill and dip it in ink. It’s so much work.


	4. Trying to find my way

Rose and Trevor had been his closest friends when he was little. Rose was his cousin, and he meets Trevor at Muggle kindergarten. He’s ten when he stops hanging out with Trevor because he can’t figure out how to have a friendship where he can’t tell someone everything.

He stops hanging out with Rose after he realizes that Scorpius will sit next to him when he is sad and walk with him when he is angry and Rose doesn’t know what to do.


	5. Try to think good thoughts

His dad made him go to see a healer after fourth year. Mental health healers were relatively new, and the one he saw was a South African who talked a lot about something called Ubuntu.

He gave Albus a questionnaire about bullying and a questionnaire about depression. Albus’ mum looks at the questionnaires after the appointment and asked him what he wanted her to do to help. He told her he didn’t know, and she said he could tell her when he decided because she was there to help him.

He started telling James when something his brother said bothered him. Sometimes James didn’t listen, but other times James did.

Sometimes he went to the Burrow, and other times when he didn’t feel like he could handle the sensory overload he sent his Nan a card and went to see Scorpius instead.

He learned Rose had been going through a lot of stuff too, but that didn’t excuse everything she said to Scorpius. He didn’t think they were friends again yet, but they were cousins, and that was good too.

He learned Scorpius no longer had a crush on Rose.

When they went to the Burrow, he sat outside with his Mum sometimes and let her teach him how to write in shorthand the way she did at matches. He always felt calmer when he went back inside for lunch.


	6. Ghosts and clouds

Albus had apologized to a lot of people, after fourth year.

He had said sorry to Scorpius, because he had dragged him into something stupid and crazy that wasn’t his fault and also was, and Scorpius had told him he had his own problems with his own dad, and they were had both done something stupid, but they were best friends.

He had said sorry to Lily, because he had ignored her for a year when she asked him and Scorpius to study with her (it would disrupt the careful avoidance routine they had). Lily was in second year, and she didn’t really know who bullied them. Albus also didn’t know Lily once got eight detentions for bat-bogeying a seventh year who called him a Squib. Lily and Ginny weren’t a lot alike, but Lily watched Ginny’s bat-bogeys carefully, just in case she needed them, and Albus felt honored that he was the reason she decided to use them.

He’d apologized to a lot of other people too, but he didn’t have to list them all every time he felt bad.

He had worked very carefully in mental health sessions to figure out that it hurt other people when he lashed out. He had a long list of coping mechanisms now, and a special journal to use when things were bad, and a mood stabilization potion. The cheerful South African Healer told him not everyone took the potions and he and his mum and dad went through lots of brochures together before they decided Albus would try them.

His dad went to one of the appointments with him, and they talked about their fight over the blanket. Albus told his dad about how badly hurt he had been. Harry told him about how he struggled to show affection because of how he grew up and how he didn’t mean what he told Albus and what he said was from trauma but that didn’t excuse it or make it ok. His dad talked about how the Weasleys were the first really happy people he knew, so he had thought a little, subconsciously, that happy families must look like the Weasleys. The healer gave his dad a list of brochures with long names on them. His dad said he wasn’t ready, but he’d think about it, and he took the brochures.

Albus and Harry still fought a lot, but they had a list of techniques to use when they did. Albus went for walks and Harry took up woodcarving and they would sit and talk when they both felt better.

Albus still couldn’t sleep, occasionally, and his dad told him how he dealt with nightmares after the war and it really did help.


	7. And nameless things

Sometimes on bad days, Albus blamed it on Voldemort. 

If his grandparents hadn’t died, his dad would have had normal parental figures and attachment and affection and all those other weird words the healer used.

Sometimes he thought he was imagining everything.It was just something that was wrong with him.

Those were the bad days though, not the good ones.

In his sixth year, Hogwarts started an anti-bullying initiative which got big quickly, so big in fact that that the IWF expanded it to all International Federation of Wizards sanctioned schools. He assumed Neville did all of it until he saw the Prophet article about his dad’s sponsorship.

Over Christmas that year he tells his dad he loves him and is proud of the healing he’s done. His dad looks up from a thick stack of brochures (how many does the healer have?) with names like “the importance of letting your teenager set boundaries”. His dad gets up to hug him but asks first. Then he tells Albus, like he had since Al was tiny, that he loves him and is proud of him too. 

Later on he always thinks of sixth year when he reminds himself you cannot get better just by fixing your family’s past and that he’s not broken.


	8. Squint your eyes & hope real hard

After Hogwarts, Albus spends some time in New York and Sydney and Phnom Penh. He meets lots of new friends who don't know much about the Potters. Scorpius visits him, and along the way, they end up being more than friends. Then Albus ends up in a roomy old house in Essex, far from his parents and grandparents, where he reforms the sprawling gardens and adopts far too many animals.

The bit of space between him and his dad is nice. They might never be best friends, but they send each other elaborate cakes as pranks (his dad once spent five hours making him a Torta Setavelli while he got drunk) and Harry is who he goes to for advice when he proposes to Scorpius. They don't see each other all the time. Albus knows boundaries are ok.

In his big roomy house, he'll wake up in the morning and take a mood stabilization potion, and he'll do yoga, and then he and Scorpius will have coffee. He goes for long walks when he gets angry, and if he spends too much time in bed he and Scorpius will read books together instead. Some days are still bad, but mostly they're good. 

On his nightstand is a journal to track bad thought patterns and photos from his first time climbing mountains in Malaysia and a collection of postcards from his Mum. He'll sit down and journal at night, and remember he's not alone, and just as he thinks that, Scorpius will pop in with tea, and Albus will breathe deeply and smile as he takes the mug.


End file.
